PANAMA CITY BEACH — The public on Wednesday will get a chance to give input into a plan for St. Andrews State Park that will dictate its future for the next decade.
It’s a meeting that has drawn the attention of group of residents who are irate about being ticketed in 2006 for bringing their dogs to Shell Island. A portion of the island is included in the park boundaries, and the state has been trying to buy up more private property on the island.
The state owns 259 of the 317 lots in the subdivision on Shell Island.
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The Florida Department of Environmental Protection’s Florida Parks Service is holding the open house to gather ideas for future updates to the management plan for the park. The workshop is set for 7 p.m. at Gulf Coast State College Student Union East Conference Center at 5230 U.S. 98 in Panama City.
The workshop will be an open-house format, with a short presentation by the staff, who will share the process of updating the plan. The public is invited to meet with staff and share thoughts on the facilities, activities and management practices at the park.
“We are hoping to gather ideas from the public on what they would like to see for the future of” the park, Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) public information officer wrote Mara Burger in an email. “Each state park or state trail in the Florida state parks system has a unit management plan that is reviewed every 10 years.” St. Andrews State Park “is reaching the point for an update to its management plan.”
Occasionally, for larger or more visited parks like St. Andrews, DEP reaches out to the public to get suggestions even before a draft is started, she said. “That is the case here,” Burger said.
Point of contention: Stephanie Somerset, who is an organizer of Bay Families with Dogs and Friends of Shell Island that was formed after residents became irate about the way state officials treated them in 2006, said she hasn’t yet determined what specific wording she would like added to the plan, but she said people should be able to pull up to the privately owned portion of Shell Island, picnic with their families and enjoy the company of their dogs.
But residents got in hot water with state officials for doing that in 2006. On a beautiful Fourth of July weekend that year, area boaters were anchored at Shell Island with their kids, coolers and umbrellas, as they have done for generations, when a helicopter landed behind them only a short distance from the children playing, Somerset said.
“Armed State Park policemen jumped out and searched the dunes for law-abiding people with their pet dogs, to charge them with criminal misdemeanors,” she said in a letter to the editor. “People with beer in their coolers got off with warnings. Police claimed they ‘owned’ out 400 feet into the water, and beckoned people ashore to give them warnings. “
In a telephone interview Monday, Somerset said state officials should “keep totheir orginal promise that they treat visitors and private property and the county right of ways with respect.
State officials “need to stop trying to incorrectly overlay state park rules onto the county right of way and the private property, nor out into the water,” she said. “We don’t believe that they’ve acted in good faith all these years towards my organizations or towards visitors to Shell Island. And it certainly doesn’t warrant them giving themselves extra powers out into the water when they haven’t kept their promises and treated people with respect as they should have over the past eight years.”
Different framework: State officials have tried to keep dogs off the island to protect bird nesting areas.
Lew Scruggs, chief of the Office of Park Planning under the DEP’s Division of Recreation and Parks, said ticketing people who brought dogs to the island in 2006 was an isolated incident that hasn’t happened since then.
“That was something that happened eight years ago,” he said. “The DEP had a different law enforcement framework then.”
He said the park has been working to educate visitors about the importance of protecting the bird nesting areas. “When birds are nesting, we post the areas so the public can understand where the birds are, and we try to explain to them that we all need to protect those animals,” he said.
Scruggs said the management plan has not had any changes since it was last updated in 2004, and the update process will take a year and involve several public hearings.
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“The purpose of the management plan is to set out a good, clear statement of how the Division of Parks will manage the natural and cultural resources and public recreation of the entire state park,” he said. “How we manage Shell Island is certainly part of the content of the management plan.”
As he prepared to head out to the fishing pier at the park dock Monday, Georgia resident Bruce MacKenzie said he hopes the new management plan will continue to allow fishing.
Scruggs said fisherman need not worry about the public pier being eliminated under the new plan. “I’m sure the dock will remain in place,” he said. “It is an important public access.”